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Nostalgia

I was woefully ignorant of Buckner & Garcia before one fateful trip to Cincinnati in early 2009. I grew up on the tail-end of the 80s arcade revolution. Did I go to some video game arcades in my youth? Yeah, I did. Did I sit around with friends and pump quarters into the machines trying to get a high score? Nope. Not even close. I grew up with Nintendo and Sega dominating the landscape of digital gaming. Arcades were already a passing phase once I was old enough to really enjoy them so it’s no wonder that I hadn’t heard of Buckner & Garcia and their minor hit “Pac-Man Fever” before 2009.

Released in December 1981, the title track of the album steadily rose on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, finally reaching #9 in March of 1982. The single sold over 1.2 million copies by the end of 1982 and over 2.5 million copies by the end of 2008. That. Is. Ridiculous.

The album Pac-Man Fever was released in January of 1982 and went on to sell over 1.2 million copies by the end of 1982. That’s pretty impressive for an album made up of songs based around arcade games. We’re not talking about the highest form of music-making here. The songs are decent and sound effects from each respective game are present, which I suppose was pretty cool and probably one of the selling points of the album. It is, at the least, a fun bit of nostalgia to bring out and listen to once a year. It surely gets me hyped up to play some Frogger and Centipede whenever I listen to it.